Background. I have recently become interested in music, music theory and practice. I’m starting off with ear training, but I am pretty much at null right now. Or maybe even below null – it seems like every other untrained person could probably do better.
Using the software solfege, I’ve tried distinguishing between the very basic intervals minor second/major second and perfect fourth/perfect fifth. I get about 80% with the former and less than 60% with the latter (and I try really hard – listening to the intervals multiple times and so on). So I’m just slightly better than someone guessing randomly.
I tried distinguishing the intervals by using solfege, that is by filling the intervals with do-re-mi-fa-sol and so on, but I with almost no success.
Eventually I found that I don’t even feel confident about whether I am even able to reproduce the same notes with my voice. I can reproduce notes by trial and error if the notes have the same sound: For example, I could reproduce the exact intervals when I used a virtual keyboard outputting to a midi synthesizer with the same instruments that the played intervals have been synthesized with. But I cannot confidently hear a unison of two differently-sounding notes.
Question. How can I effectively learn to reproduce a note? Do I need a teacher to do that or can I teach it myself? Or is it even impossible to learn? How can I gain certainty with hearing unisons?
And since ear training is not technically singing, what kind of teacher should I approach?